Makonbu

The broth runs clear and golden, carrying a refined sweetness with no bitterness. Thick leaves hold their shape when heated and stay soft enough for simmered dishes even after making stock. The finest grade, with its telltale white-cut cross-section, is set apart from other regions' kelp as "white-mouth beach" kelp, and carries a faint sweetness even raw — said to have once been served as a confection where it was presented at court, a sign of how concentrated its flavor is.

Kelp cut on the opening day of the summer harvest is dried in the sun. Along the Minamikayabe coast, forced cultivation was established in the 1960s with guidance from a Hokkaido fisheries research body, so wild and farmed kelp are now grown side by side. The thickest leaves with the whitest cut are sorted out as premium stock, suited even to high-grade salted kelp and shaved kelp products — a range of uses that sets it apart from other kelp.

Once presented by the Matsumae domain to the imperial court and shogunate, it earned the nickname "tribute kelp," and a record from the shogunate's survey of Ezo is said to have called it "kelp beneath heaven, a peerless kelp." Though harvested in Hokkaido, it was long shipped south by Kitamaebune ships to the Kansai and Hokuriku regions where processors clustered — and Kansai has remained the center of its consumption ever since, a twist between where it grows and where it is eaten that is said to have shaped Kansai's own kelp-broth culture.